Moving your online shop to a new platform without losing your Google rankings

The single most common way a replatforming goes wrong is not the new shop. It is that a few weeks after launch, traffic from Google quietly falls away, and nobody can say why.

The reason is almost always the same, and it is entirely preventable. Here is what happens, and what has to be done before, during and after the move so it does not.

Why rankings drop after a move#

Google does not rank your shop. It ranks individual pages: this product, that category, the blog post from three years ago that still brings in visitors every week. Each of those is known to Google by its exact web address.

Change platform and the addresses usually change too. Shopify, WooCommerce and every other platform have their own way of building URLs. The page for the same product moves from one address to another, and as far as Google is concerned the old page has vanished and a new, unknown one has appeared in its place. The history, the links pointing to it, the position it had earned, none of that follows automatically.

That is the whole problem. Everything below is about making it follow.

Before the move: make the list#

Every URL the old shop has, and which ones matter. Search Console tells you which pages Google shows people and how often. Your analytics tells you which ones bring visitors. Together they give you the list of pages you cannot afford to lose.

What each old page becomes. Every important old address needs a matching new one. A product maps to the same product, a category to the same category. Where a page genuinely has no equivalent, it should point at the nearest sensible thing, not at the home page.

What already ranks, written down. Positions and traffic for the important pages, recorded before the move. Without that baseline you cannot tell afterwards whether anything changed.

This list is the most important document in the whole project, and it is usually the one nobody writes.

During the move: the redirects#

For every old address on the list, the new site needs a permanent redirect, the technical name is a 301, sending both visitors and Google from the old address to the new one.

A permanent redirect tells Google that the page has moved rather than disappeared, and most of what the old page had earned travels with it. Done for every important page, the move is close to invisible to search. Done for some of them, you lose the rest. Not done at all, you start again.

Keep the content. Product descriptions, category text and page titles that rank should come across as they are. A move is not the moment to rewrite everything, because you will not be able to tell whether a drop came from the move or the rewrite.

Keep the details that are easy to forget. Image addresses, PDF downloads, old blog posts, and pages that are linked from other sites. They all have addresses, and they all need forwarding.

After the move: check#

Submit the new sitemap in Search Console the day you launch.

Watch the errors. Search Console will start reporting pages it cannot find. Each one is an old address without a redirect. Fix them as they appear, daily for the first few weeks.

Compare against the baseline. A small wobble in the first fortnight is normal while Google catches up. A steady fall in a particular group of pages points at a group of missing redirects.

Leave the redirects in place. Permanently. Removing them a year later because the new site is "settled" undoes the protection.

What to ask a supplier#

Whether the redirect map is part of the quote, written as a line item rather than assumed.

Whether they will hand you the map itself, so you can see every old address and where it now goes.

And whether they will check Search Console with you after launch, rather than calling the job finished the day the new shop goes live.

What we do#

Replatforming is work we do, and the redirect map is part of the job rather than an extra. You get the map, you get the baseline, and you get the check afterwards.

You describe the move. It gets graded by size, and you get a price in writing before anything starts. Nothing begins until you approve it.

If the honest answer is that you do not need to move at all, and a few fixes on the platform you have would do, that is the answer you will get first.

The price changes with the size of the job. The standard never does.